Now it was Saturday afternoon and he was standing on Chloe’s doorstep with two duffle bags, already smiling. He’d knocked, which meant he was five seconds closer to seeing her again. To hearing her voice, instead of imagining it as he read her texts. To touching her …
She opened the door.
The first thing he noticed was her eyes, bright and excited behind her glasses. Maybe because she wanted to see him, too. Or maybe she was unexpectedly buzzed about camping. She certainly looked prepared: her hair was in one of those fancy-looking braids he didn’t know the name of, and she was dressed in color-coordinated walking gear. Usually he’d miss her pretty skirts, but the leggings clinging to her thick thighs suited him fine.
“Stop staring at me, you pervert,” she said.
He looked up just as she launched herself at him. Between the force of Chloe flinging her arms around him, and the weight of the bags on his shoulders, it was a miracle he didn’t collapse. But he managed to stay upright, and his reward was her mouth: she kissed the hell out of him.
Reality shifted, shrinking to a fine point that consisted of nothing but her hands tangling in his hoodie and her tongue easing tentatively over his. She smelled like rain-scattered flowers and warmth and comfort and mindless fucking lust. He couldn’t hold her the way he wanted to, so he let his mouth speak for his occupied hands. He tasted her like sweet nectar, bit her lower lip, swallowed her soft little moans greedily. Then, after the shortest forever on earth, she pulled away. Broke the kiss. Rested her forehead against his and closed her eyes, breathing heavily for a moment. The sound of her panting made him smile.
She opened her eyes and murmured, “Hi.”
“Hi,” he replied, his voice rough. “I take it you’re excited to camp?”
She laughed and pulled him inside, shutting the door behind them. “Gosh, yes.”
He followed her into the living room, noticing happily that the flat was just tidy enough to suggest that she was feeling okay. “Really?”
“Of course,” she drawled. She was kneeling on the floor by a single enormous rucksack, fiddling with the straps and sliding a pink water bottle into a side pocket. “I’m like a child going to Disneyland. I can’t wait to be trampled by moose in the night, or perhaps eaten by a bear, or chopped up by a serial killer, wrapped up in pieces of the tent and kept in a freezer for the next five years.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose, shaking his head. “Button. We don’t have to do this. You know that, right?”
“Of course I know it. I want to do something that scares me.”
“Camping,” he said. “Camping scares you.”
“No comment.” She gave him a sphinxlike smile. He wanted to kiss it off her face.
“Well, you don’t need to worry,” he said, finally putting down his massive bags. “I’m not going to let anyone chop you up.”
“Right. Because you’re a big strong man who can fight off seasoned machete murderers with the power of your mighty masculinity.”
He would not laugh. “And we don’t have moose, Chlo. Or bears.”
She turned to look at him. “I’m quite certain that we do.”
“We don’t.”
“We definitely have bears.”
“We don’t. If we had bears it’d be in the news all the time. You know, Fine upstanding British man attacked by a bear, EU to blame, Brexit now.”
“I’m quite certain I saw that headline on a copy of the Daily Mail the other week.”
“You didn’t, love.”
She tutted as if he was being unreasonable. “We’ll see. Do you have bug repellent, by the way? I do.”
Bug repellent? Where did she think they were going, a swamp? “Are you offering to share?”
She sniffed. “You really should’ve brought your own. Two bags, and you didn’t bring your own?”
“I’ve got other stuff in my bags,” he said, sitting on the floor beside her.
“Such as?”
He unzipped his duffel and pulled out a packet of marshmallows that was the size of a child. “We’re gonna make s’mores and shit.”
She dropped the bug repellent and jumped him again. Literally threw herself into his lap. He barely caught her, and then she was kissing him, kissing him, kissing him with the kind of hot, dark determination he felt for her, and it was wonderful. Her hands slid into his hair, her body rocked against his, and he felt as if she’d reached into his chest and squeezed his heart because it was suddenly, blatantly obvious that it belonged to her. He belonged to her.
He blinked, dazed, unsure of what to do with all these intense, impossible feelings. She pulled away, her laughter bright and infectious. “S’mores! I do love a man with a food-related plan. I hope you know we’re going to finish that bag.”
He smiled, but he couldn’t even speak. That divine, Rococo face had turned him on and pissed him off from the very beginning, but now when he looked at her he didn’t see her untouchable beauty so much as he saw Chloe, his Chloe, with that sardonic tilt to her lips and that superior gleam in her eyes. His heart shook. He ran his hands over her body just to remind himself that he could, that she was real and there and his. She felt soft and lush beneath what seemed to be three or four layers of clothing. He grabbed a handful of her arse and finally managed to say, “That’s my girl.”
“Shut up, you misogynistic pig.” She kissed his right cheek, then his left. “I didn’t see you yesterday.”
“No, you didn’t. Did you miss me?”
“Choke, Redford. Just choke.”
He seemed to adore her more every second. This could be a problem. “Come here.” He kissed her again because she was addictive. But then he reminded himself that he had specific and important plans, none of which included fucking Chloe on her living room floor. With a sigh, he nudged her off his lap. “All right. Stop distracting me. We gotta go.”
“Distracting you?” she said, then grabbed her rucksack and stood, hands on her hips. She was moving faster, more easily than usual, even for a good day. “Honestly, I can’t stand you sometimes.” But she was smiling, big and uncontained, just like him.
Red made fun of Chloe’s driving all the way to the campsite and she couldn’t even bring herself to mind. When he’d learned she actually had a car, he’d feigned deathly shock, which was ridiculous because he must have known already.
“Who did you think was parking in my designated space?” she demanded.
“I had no idea,” he said cheerfully. “Drug dealers. Aliens, maybe.”
On the way to the site he’d chosen for them, a place named Tyburn’s Wood, they got lost three times in a maze of sweet little villages with houses built of stone. After the third time, Red turned off her sat nav and pulled out a bright yellow booklet. She snorted as he opened it on his lap, revealing the kind of massive, multicolored map that made her eyes blur far worse than any line of code ever had. “What on earth is that monstrosity?”
“It’s what human beings used to get around for the last couple thousand years. You know, instead of relying on fancy sky computers.”
It was all she could do not to veer off the road. “Fancy sky computers? Why, Redford, I had no idea you were such a technophobe.”